Kill List (aka There's A Bigger Picture In The Business World)

The opening act of Ben Wheatley's 2011 film Kill List closes with a fade to black and a whispered voice commanding its protagonist to "wake up". The voice belongs to a child - he's none other than Sam (Harry Simpson), the son of embittered ex-soldier Jay (Neil Maskell) - but is not immediately recognisable as such. It sounds sinister and otherworldly, as though beckoning Jay into another, more treacherous reality. As the second act gets underway, Jay does indeed leave the confines of his drab domestic existence and venture into territory that, while its nature was intermittently hinted at throughout that first half hour, feels miles removed from it. Come the third act, and Jay is once again urged to wake up, this time by his Swedish-born wife Shel (MyAnna Buring), and heads out into a darkness so grotesque and off of the beaten track that by the end he doesn't even seem to be dwelling in the same universe as where he started. On the surface, Jay does not appear to awaken, but rather treks ever deeper into an increasingly unsettled dream - what originates as a drama about marital stresses, set in a familiar world of suburban skylines and awkward dinner parties, morphs into an ultra-violent thriller about the uncovering and destruction of an underground video ring, before lurching into full-bore folk horror for its big finale. Early on, the film teases us with the possibility that Jay's journey might represent a repeated failure to come to grips with reality, as he and his long-time business partner Gal (Michael Smiley) drive to meet with their new Client (Struan Rodger) and park their vehicle underneath an oddly incongruous rainbow (which, as per Wheatley's commentary, was not planned and got into the picture by total kismet), a playful hint that we are not in Kansas (or Sheffield) any more. And yet, the world that Jay spends the middle half traversing is not exactly Oz, and sleeping is the one thing that he never seems to get up to. On the road, he spends most of his time in nondescript budget hotels and assumes the life of a wandering insomniac, gazing out of windows, as if hoping that some grand purpose will reveal itself, and surveying only street lights and vacant spaces. Only as the second act is nearing its end, and Jay is about to return to his domestic life with Shel and Sam, does he find something resembling the answer he seeks. He looks outside, and sees a figure on the horizon returning his gaze. For a brief moment, at the height of Jay's restlessness, the mundaneness that dominates the picture, even at its most repugnant, appears to converge with something overtly more fantastical. Jay is not asleep in this moment. Rather, his reality is only just coming into focus.

The script, penned by real husband and wife team Wheatley and Amy Jump, opens with a series of hauntingly authentic arguments between Jay and Shel, and with Sam silently attempting to go about his business in the backdrop. Crucially, one of these quarrels establishes that Jay has a tendency (as Gal later defines it) to go "way off list", when he is tasked with buying groceries for an upcoming dinner date but fails to follow the list Shel has supplied and spends £197 on copious bottles of wine and tins of tuna. The major underlying tension between them is that Jay has been out of work for eight months, and the family's finances are beginning to feel the strain. Jay is plagued by pains both physical (he insists that the upkeep of the jacuzzi in the garden is a necessary expense for his back, and is informed by Shel, perhaps tellingly, that it is all in his head) and psychological (he is troubled by memories of a previous job in Kiev, the details of which are kept to a minimum). He obviously feels a tremendous sense of dissatisfaction in his day to day life, a feeling of being unable to measure up to the chivalric ideals of the King Arthur legends adored by his son. In one scene he attempts to supersede the Arthurian bedtime story requested by Sam with a mythologised retelling of what we presume to be his own experiences as a soldier in Iraq (they take place in a land called "Bagdadistan") - experiences which, he makes clear during the subsequent dinner scene, brought him little in the way of fulfilment or prestige. Despite the harrowing realism with which the family's domestic disarray is presented in the establishing sequences, it would appear that joy and unity has not completely evaporated from their ranks - Jay, Shel and Sam are at their happiest while play-fighting with the toy swords that Jay has also picked up on his haphazard shopping trip, an ostensibly wholesome interaction that foreshadows the film's tragic final outcome.

The world they inhabit is in decline and about to undergo a "reconstruction" - something set in motion with the arrival of Fiona (Emma Fryer), Gal's enigmatic new girlfriend, who accompanies him to Jay and Shel's dinner party. During the dinner, it becomes apparent that Jay and Gal have a dark history working as assassins for fire, and tensions arise as to whether Jay's arm will be twisted by Gal and Shel into "getting back on the horse" and accepting a local job in the UK that requires them to bump off a list comprised of three names. Fiona, who is seemingly ignorant to all of this and believes Jay and Gal to be travelling salesmen, introduces herself as working in "human resources". She is described by Gal as a "hatchet person", indicating that there is a parallel to be drawn between her line of work and his own. Fiona elaborates on her role through a barrage of euphemisms: "If there's a department that's underperforming, I go in and assess the extraneous manpower and de-force accordingly." When Jay and Shel deduce that she lays people off, she insists that it isn't personal, and that "there's a bigger picture in the business world...a lot of dirty work to be done." Fiona presents herself as almost hopelessly naive - she rubs the Northern Irish Gal the wrong way with her insinuation that the Troubles was an absurd conflict because Catholics and Protestants are "all the same religion" - but we're given enough evidence that she has entered into Jay's house with a sinister agenda of her own. She repeatedly disappears into the bathroom, where we observe her carving an occult symbol behind the mirror, just as Jay and Shel appear to have found a resolution to their own falling out. Elsewhere, there is a moment where Gal takes Sam aside and jokingly (one would hope) advises him to give tap water a wide berth because "the government puts stuff in it that shrinks your balls". He echoes Jay's concerns about modern suburban life being stifling and emasculating, while evoking the feeling of there being some malevolent unseen design dictating the characters' lives. The horror of Kill List lies in the gradual revelation of this design, and how it conceals itself within the most banal of corners. If Jay spends any portion of the film within a dream, it is surely in the grey prosaicness of that initial act, where he has the luxury of being able to stay submerged in ignorance and in his (relatively) guileless fantasies of attaining legendary heroism. Shel is right about the jacuzzi's significance being all in his head, insofar as in represents an indulgence in a materialism that seems totally detached from the reality of their situation. As pointed out, their picture doesn't extend any further than their front door, but there is a bigger picture beyond it, in which Fiona is clearly well within her element.

Jay and Gal sign a contract with the Client (who insists on spilling blood from the palm of Jay's hand as part of the process) and set out to hunt down the individuals on their given kill list - the Priest (Gareth Tunley), the Librarian (Mark Kempner) and the MP (James Nickerson). But even then, these contract killings play out in a world that seems oppressively ordinary and mundane. They note that the home where the Priest resides "doesn't look like house of a major villain", and the Librarian's front walls are adorned deceptively with flowers. The most notable things to happen to the men when they're not handling their business involve a credit card declining (an everyday annoyance, but one that Jay frets will brings unnecessary attention their way) and, a notch more disconcertingly, an encounter with an evangelist Christian group who get Jay's goat by breaking out into a singalong of "Onward Christian Soldier" at a hotel dining area. The outside world seems eerily empty and (aside from the Priest's parishioners and some out of focus children Jay observes on a sports field) largely devoid of incidental souls - the Christian group prove intolerable because the dinning room is, as Gal observes, "like a graveyard and yet they still fucking plod up next to us". A mounting feeling that something is off comes in the reactions they get from their targets as they corner and dispatch them, giving the impression that they are in a bizarre joke that the hitmen are not - the Priest thanks Jay before he shoots him dead, while the Librarian tells him how honored he is to have met him before being brutally pummelled to death with a hammer (and despite being a contender for the film's most luridly violent sequence, it turns into somewhat of a black comedy number, with the Librarian repeatedly thanking Jay in between drawn-out screams of agony). Meanwhile, Gal tussles with his conscience in ways that Jay does not - despite sharing in Jay's disdain for the Christian group, he is not without religious leanings and has misgivings about the prospect of killing a priest (which he attempts to overcome with the resigned observation that, "At least we're not killing a toddler" - interpreted by some viewers as a hint as to what actually went down on that fateful job in Kiev). He also grows increasingly uneasy with the relish with which Jay seems to embrace his hitman duties.

 

Once again, Jay cannot resist the temptation to wander off list, when he catches wind of the kinds of videos the Librarian archives (implied to be of the snuff or pornographic variety) and is so morally repulsed that he forces the Librarian to reveal the whereabouts of the people behind them so that he can personally take them out. But even with Jay actively looking for trouble, we get the inkling that the really dangerous stuff is going on where he is not. Although Fiona supposedly dumps Gal in the aftermath of the dinner (he reports waking up to find her gone and a Dear John letter taped to his penis), we learn from Jay's communication with Shel that she has integrated herself into the family home in his absence. In their quieter, more casual conversations between waiting for their quarry to appear, Jay and Gal discuss Fiona and dance unknowingly close to her insidious nature - Jay describes her as a "glary-eyed phantom", while Gal calls her a "real demon in bed". Gal confesses that he has been unable to get her out of his head, and it seems that he is not the only one whose mind Fiona has infiltrated. She is the figure that Jay sees outside of his hotel window, having emerged from the void to return his heedful gaze. Fiona has become a seemingly omnipresent part of Jay's life, capable both of keeping tabs on him from alongside the road and lying in wait for his return back at home. The two of them share a conspiratorial wave that indicates a possible sexual attraction on Jay's part, although whatever adulterous stirrings he might feel prove entirely symbolic. She represents the allure of the unseen world beyond his domain, the apparent purpose for which he has persistently hungered in his day to day life. Her entry into his family's house is not benevolent, but rather points toward the darker meaning of her claims of being in "human resources" with a duty to "assess the extraneous manpower and de-force accordingly". "Hatchet person" would indeed be an accurate description of what she does, for she has identified and earmarked several inessential individuals for death, although not necessarily the same ones on the list that the Client has handed Jay and Gal. This particular list lands a lot closer to home.

A figure in Kill List who gets little attention in discussions of the film but who strikes me as an intriguing component of its underlying puzzle is the family cat, who seems at once to represent all parties in the equation. The cat itself goes unnamed and is only briefly seen alive, but is supposedly responsible for the mangled animal carcass the family find in their back garden at the beginning of the second act, before Jay goes off to resume his role as ritual executioner. The animal is a rabbit, but is so badly mutilated (it has effectively been turned inside out), that Jay is only able to identify it as such by dipping his finger in the mass of blood and organs and tasting it (much to Shel's revulsion). The cat is, notably, black, a choice that would appear to align it with the bewitching Fiona and her raven hair - indeed, there is a sleight of hand within the script in which the cat and Fiona become momentarily blurred. When Shel remarks, "She's taking the piss", our immediate thought might be that "she" refers to Fiona. We might even assume a connection between the dead body that turns up on the family's lawn and the occult symbol that Fiona had secretly carved in their bathroom the night before. Jay's response clarifies that they are talking about the cat, although the context, along with the severely mutilated state of the rabbit, primes us for something a little more sinister. There is, in the imagery of Jay cooking the rabbit and devouring it out in his garden (with Shel having objected to his doing so inside the kitchen), the suggestion that a sacrificial offering has been made to Jay, and of a state of separation being required between Jay and his family in order for him to accept it. At the same time, we might detect questions about Jay's real nature in Shel's comments about the cat to Sam: "Daddy thinks the cat brings us little presents...I just think the cat likes killing rabbits." Jay aspires to be a provider for his family, and whatever evil he might commit as a hitman is supposedly being carried out for their benefit, although could it be that he's really in it for the thrill of killing? Later, when Fiona returns to the family home, we hear that she has been bringing Sam presents, a development that seems uncomfortably evocative of the cat's supposed rabbit-killing practices, once again aligning Fiona with the cat and raising questions about her own intentions. Conversely, the cat is also tied up in the innocence of Sam, which is imperilled with Fiona's arrival - according to Shel, Sam has reported having bad dreams about the cat, a hint of the danger facing himself and Shel. Finally, the cat is a hunter who becomes the hunted, foreshadowing Gal's own grisly fate, and the extent to which Jay has been the prey of external forces all along.

(Spoilers now follow) 

The cat is the first of Jay's household to die, when, thrown off by the experience with the video ring, he tries returning home with the contract unfinished and the matter of the MP still outstanding. She might not, however, have been first individual close to Jay to be eliminated by the powers secretly pulling the strings. Prior to discovering the cat's lifeless body strung up on his porch, he visits the local clinic, seeking medical attention for the infected cut on his palm, and finds that his regular GP has been replaced by a mysterious gentleman (Damien Thomas) who advises him to think only of the present moment - the question of what happened to Dr Bapkin is never answered. By now Jay has already journeyed past the point of no return. His entire world has been rearranged in his absence, and he finds that he cannot slip back into the way things were before. Nor do he and Gal have any means of altering their place within this scheme. When they approach the Client to ask that he release them from the contract, offering to find replacements to complete the job in their stead, they are refused, with the Client informing them that he sees them for what they are: "You're cogs...so keep turning." They are warned that their families will be killed if they do not live up to their duties, but it seems that Jay never had any genuine choice in this matter. For as they set out to locate the MP and complete the contract, Jay finds himself unwittingly fulfilling a second, unwritten kill list. By the end of the film, he will have lived up to his full potential, but every single being he cares about will have been obliterated on his path to glory.

Jay and Gal journey to the MP's whereabouts, on secluded rural grounds, and find him fronting a gathering of masked pagan cultists carrying out a ritual human sacrifice. Upon becoming aware of the hitmen, the MP openly accepts death, but the other cultists attack and pursue them down an underground tunnel, where Gal is set upon and gutted like a fish (or rather like a rabbit?). Jay is able to fend the cultists off, but Gal is left so brutally eviscerated that Jay is obligated to mercy kill him. The context in which he kills Gal is clear, and yet it proves troubling that Gal's last words, before Jay pulls the trigger, are "Thanks", echoing the dying words of his previous targets and implanting the suggestion that Gal is yet another sacrifice who goes willingly so that Jay may fulfil his purpose. Jay attempts to escape and to reunite with Shel and Sam (who have relocated to a holiday cottage for their safety), but is ultimately captured by the cultists, who force him to duel with one further target, a cloaked "Hunchback", in a knife fight. Jay rises gamely to the challenge and emerges as the victor, having stabbed the Hunchback multiple times, only for the cloak to be removed and it to be revealed that his opponent was really Shel with Sam upon her back (recalling their mock battle from the initial act). Sam has already succumbed to his wounds; meanwhile, the bleeding Shel looks Jay in the eyes and collapses into a fit of laughter before she too expires. This laughter is considerably more disturbing than Gal's reaction to being put down by Jay, in part because it isn't entirely explicable. It seems improbable that Shel was herself a part of the conspiracy all along, given that in the preceding scene she was shown putting her own military background into use in an effort to protect Sam from the attacking cultists. And yet she too seems to go down embracing her own destruction, and Sam's, as though she's suddenly in on the joke that has, until now, eluded Jay. For his part, Jay responds to the final reveal with more limited emotion - he seems saddened, but not exactly distraught. He'd previously admitted to feeling bad about the cat and was obviously distressed at having to kill Gal, but by the end seems to have lost his ability to be overly appalled by his situation, or indeed by himself. Kill List closes with the cultists removing their masks, revealing that their members include Fiona, the Client and the replacement GP, before the expressionless Jay is crowned as their new leader.

Jay ends up realising his destiny as an AntiChrist figure, or more accurately an AntiArthur figure, an ostensibly ordinary being who becomes king when his capabilities are recognised as excelling that of a regular man. Unlike King Arthur, Jay's actions throughout the film indicate that his reign is unlikely to be one of benevolence. Jay and Gal had earlier asked the Client how long they had been working for him; the cultists had, it seemed, already marked Jay out as their prospective new leader since long before the depicted events, and had been manipulating him for all of that time. Wheatley's film invites inevitable comparisons with Robin Hardy's highly influential folk horror The Wicker Man (1973), and to the similarly gut-wrenching fate of its protagonist Neil Howie - Jay is valued for his ability to sacrifice others as opposed to becoming a sacrifice himself, but in practice we might sense little difference. Jay has spent the narrative in search of a mythical chivalry, which ultimately must stay mythical. He needs, fundamentally, to see himself as a righteous man combatting the evils of the world, but there is clearly a great deal of darkness in his soul with which he has long struggled to reckon, and which he finally gives way to. He indicates during the dinner scene that his dissatisfaction in serving in the Iraq War came from it being difficult to know where he stood in that conflict, and wishes that he could have gone up against the Nazis; he also expresses something resembling admiration for the Nazis when he states that they "had no time for extraneous", raising questions as to whether that yearning stems from him seeing them as clearly-defined villains or as worthy adversaries. He later tries to justify the killing of the Priest to the reluctant Gal on the grounds that the Priest is potentially a child molester, and adds, "As a parent, I'd do them all, even if I weren't getting paid." He insists that he feels no remorse for going off list and massacring the video ring because "They were bad people, they should suffer." But by the film's end, he has sacrificed the very values he saw himself as fighting to uphold, in the form of his wife and son, and the question of whether he was truly his family's benefactor or merely a man who revelled in violence has been answered. It is Jay's weakness for violence, we suspect, that has made him so susceptible to the manipulations of the cult; his deficiencies in cutting it as a family man, meanwhile, are precisely why the family themselves needed to be cut loose from the picture. So long as they were around, they were reminders of where he was failing to be all that he could be. And with them removed, he no longer has any pretensions of being guided by morality.

In those final moments Jay wears a crown, but has he actually transcended the level of the cog the Client had earlier asserted that he was? Or has he in fact been recognised as the ultimate cog, a killing machine that can be programmed to destroy anything so long as he can be convinced that it serves a higher purpose? Jay's impassiveness during the closing arrangement could be interpreted two ways - perhaps he's come to terms with that grim reality and is sinking into his new role, or perhaps the hollowness of his supposed victory is not lost on him. There is an uneasy feeling of destiny in this outcome, as if something well-entrenched in Jay's nature was always going to bring him to this point - in one scene, he shares with Gal that he "used to love looking at fires" as a child, foreshadowing the flaming torches that surround him in the final sequence. The prevalence of the inhumane in the everyday is a recurring theme throughout - it is notable that even the innocence of Sam's play pretence reveals a cultural worship of violence that is ingrained from a very young age. He likes to play with swords and other toy weapons and, as acknowledged, it is that seemingly joyful sword fight at the start that emerges as one of the film's most chilling omens on repeat viewings. Sam is clearly upset about the cat, but during its burial is busy firing off his water blaster.

We might be left wondering what the interval with the evangelist Christian group had to do with any of this, aside from depicting Jay in a more restrained mode - he talks about how much he would like to massacre the group, but settles simply for taking their guitar (because Jimi Hendrix they ain't) and giving them a royal chewing out. The group is in some respects an entirely everyday annoyance, strangers who encroach on boundaries and show no consideration for the world beyond their own bubble. But they are also an intrusion from from an entirely disparate reality, with their talk of redemption seeming misplaced enough against the tedious banality of the restaurant, let alone the dark path that Jay and Gal are currently on. Jay suggests that they pass on a message to God, that "If you're the kind of people he hangs about with, stay out of my way", while Gal requests, with more feigned cordiality, that if they're "speaking to the big man, put in a word for us". By the end, Jay has become the big man (one that any devoted cultist would be thrilled to be personally bumped off by), and has swapped out his family for the kind of odious folks a god would hang about with. His own end point was foreshadowed when he told the evangelists' leader, "Your time and place is in a very isolated location, where no one is likely to be for about a hundred fucking years". Jay has wandered extremely far from home, taken up the mantle of a god of a forbidden landscape (without ever ceasing to be a cog), and still seems every bit as alienated as he was when he began. 

Mr Hat's Second Biggest Mystery (South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut)

 

The single biggest mystery surrounding South Park's Mr Hat is obviously how he managed to reach the gas pedal in the episode "Chef Aid" in order to operate a truck and break Mr Garrison and Chef out of jail. That's something that is just flat-out unknowable. It's also not the kind of mystery that I suspect many of us are liable to lose a whole lot of sleep over. The inexplicability of it all is, in part, what makes it so hilarious. More crucially still, this was Mr Hat's finest hour, and the outcome was monumentally awesome. He'd used his preternatural puppet powers for heroic purposes, atoning to Garrison for being a two-timing whore and enabling Chef to attend the benefit concert his friends from the rock business were holding in his honor. The particulars of how he managed to pull this off seem irrelevant when he brought such cheers and lifted spirits all round.

The same cannot be said for Mr Hat's second biggest mystery, which is the one that caused yours truly quite a bit of heartbreak and confusion during the summer of 1999. I speak of the theatrical feature film, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and of the small role he played in its conclusion. Let's take a moment to reflect on how the movie, for all of its merits, has rather a vexing resolution insofar as Mr Hat is concerned, one that appears to leave him and Garrison dangling and gives out contradictory signals regarding which suitor's hand he ends up on. This one gets kind of personal, so buckle up. 

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut climaxes with combat breaking out between American and Canadian forces, and Kyle and Cartman getting caught in the crossfire. While fleeing the ensuing carnage they encounter a mortally wounded Garrison, who pleads with the boys to take Mr Hat with them. They initially attempt to honor his request, but Cartman quickly tires of hanging onto the puppet and discards it. Soon after, Satan arrives on Earth to bring about the apocalypse, accompanied by his manipulative and emotionally abusive lover, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, and trailed by the soul of a damned but determined Kenny McCormick. Satan continues to be subjugated by Saddam, but with the moral support of Kenny he finally summons the resolve to stand up to him. Out of gratitude to Kenny, Satan agrees to grant him one wish (apparently he can do that benignly, not just through Faustian bargains), and Kenny asks for things to go back to the way they were before the war (aware that this would not exempt him from his own dark fate). Satan laments that he seems destined to live forever in solitude, when he notices the discarded Mr Hat and asks if he'd be willing to accompany him back to Hell. Satan throws his voice to supply the puppet's response - "Sure, I bet we could be best friends, Mr Satan" - and in doing so he eerily acquires the accent and effeminate tones of Garrison. This can be interpreted in two different ways. Either Mr Hat is literally speaking through Satan, as he can be perceived as doing with Garrison, and is actively flirting with him (which I guess tracks with his record for being a two-timing whore), OR Satan has officially hit rock bottom in his desperation and risks sinking into Garrison's derangement. (I gave my thoughts on the question of Mr Hat's reality in my coverage of "Weight Gain 4000", and am once again inclined to apply the philosophy that both things can be true.) An uplifted Satan makes his departure, still holding onto Mr Hat, and the bloodshed on Earth is duly undone. Garrison recovers from his injuries and anxiously looks around for his puppet companion, unaware of what transpired. Meanwhile, the entire town joins hands and celebrates its miraculous deliverance with a reprise of the opening number, "Mountain Town".

There is one further twist to this scenario that we'll get to shortly, but let me first stress upfront that for my young teenaged self, who had been sitting there lapping up every solitary second of this film until that moment, this aspect of the ending proved to be the humongous fly pissing nosily in the ointment. To say that it sat uneasily with me would be an understatement, since it's all well and good for Satan to want to alleviate his loneliness with an endearingly uncanny puppet, but where exactly would that leave Garrison? I felt so strongly that Satan's happiness should not come at the expense of Garrison's, and that's a sentiment I'll continue to stand by. Because Garrison has feelings too, you know. He might be a royal dickhole in most regards, but the puppet was the one thing he genuinely loved and cared about. At this point in the series he was still very dependent on his relationship with Mr Hat, and we'd already seen in "Summer Sucks" how depressed he became in being separated from him for a prolonged length of time. With the help of Mr Twig, he was able to bluff his way through most of that absence, but he was clearly not a happy bunny deep down. Whenever the children asked him when Mr Hat was coming back (as seen in "Clubhouses" and "Chef Aid") it cut right through his facade like a knife through butter. So the implication that he was about to be subjected to round two of that process seemed really unnecessarily cruel. Not to mention that we, like Garrison's class, had just spent a good chunk of Season 2 waiting for Mr Hat to return (because Mr Twig was blatantly never going to replace him), so were they seriously about to send him packing again, not even nine months after he and Garrison were reconciled in "Chef Aid"? Was this going to be a regular thing with that puppet?

Or was this all in fact a gigantic false alarm, and I was allowing myself to get stupid hung up over absolutely nothing (and not for the first time)? Because there is this one additional detail at the end of the film that I want to call attention to and cannot emphasise enough - Mr Hat is back with Mr Garrison in the final sequence. It isn't explained how, but he is. They appear together in two different shots, the first being in the crowd zoom-out during the reprise of "Mountain Town". And then at the very end, Garrison and Mr Hat are among the characters bidding farewell to Kenny as he rises out of Hell and, in recognition of his most noble deed, is welcomed by the angels into Heaven. Garrison is waving, while Mr Hat's gaze is directed upward, indicating that he's very attuned to what's going on. Neither reappearance went unnoticed in the cinema, and they definitely made me feel a whole lot better. In my head, I could rationalise it perfectly. After all, Kenny had wished for everything to be returned to the way it was before the war. He was, in effect, wishing for the restoration of the status quo, so that things could resume as normal and there would be no lasting consequences to have to grapple with in the series (his demise was the only outstanding matter that would explicitly not be remedied by the wish, but we all knew that was automatically being reset). Which ultimately required Mr Hat to go straight back to Garrison, whether Satan was on board with that or not. That might seem like a sorry turn of events for Satan, who would have had his sole consolation stripped away from him offscreen, but the dude can't just be stealing other people's puppet boyfriends. Not to mention, it wouldn't really have been a happy ending for him anyway, if the implication was that he'd have become as mentally damaged as Garrison (so which of them would actually have been taking the other to Hell?). Best just to let this one go, old Nick. You do have your upcoming relationship with Chris the nutritionist to look forward to. (Oh, and maybe give some attention to Damien, ya sodding deadbeat?)

It should also be noted that this was indeed consistent with the continuity of the series, where Mr Hat was still with Garrison, and there was never any reference to Satan coming between them - although I had to wait a few months to confirm it, as the UK was currently between Seasons 2 and 3, and I didn't really get into using this internet thing until the year 2000 (and even then, mostly to look up fake Pokémon cheats...I never did get that Pikablu after wandering round the Safari Zone for hours).

Technically everything worked out. But I still walked away from the experience with a sour taste in my mouth. Having Mr Hat show up at the end was absolutely better than nothing, but I didn't like the fact that they hadn't addressed it within the narrative, making his final status a little fuzzy. How could I be certain that his reappearance was even part of the plan and not some random animation error? That it happened in two shots and not just one, and that the second reappearance had seemed so prominent gave me some hope that this wasn't the case, but I couldn't say for sure. To this day, I still don't know what the intention was, and it's one of those things where if I dwell on it for more than ten seconds, it will bug the living snot out of me. It's for this reason that I've always had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. There's a lot that I can love about it - the soundtrack, the new characters of Gregory and Mole, the interplay between Saddam and Satan, the reveal of Kenny's face and his final redemption (not that Kenny was ever in any serious need of redemption from the viewer's perspective, but he demonstrated what a good kid he is at heart). But that moment where Garrison regains consciousness and asks "Where's Mr Hat?" hurts me too damned much, and since it occurs right at the end, that's the feeling I'm inevitably left with. I just said that I liked the soundtrack, but simply hearing that reprise of "Mountain Town" sends instantaneous chills down my spine.

It's also why I'll reflexively grit my teeth whenever I hear anyone suggest that Bigger, Longer and Uncut would have been a really magnificent and logical point on which to have concluded the franchise (a discussion that seemed more pertinent nearer the time, when there were doubts about the series' longevity). I cannot tell you how relieved I am that this wasn't where it ended. If we'd lived in an alternate reality where South Park had been required to bow out early, then I honestly believe that the Season 3 finale, "World Wide Recorder Concert", would have been a much more triumphant curtain call. I've some major biases on that point, since "World Wide Recorder Concert" is my favourite South Park episode, and it's probably not a coincidence that Garrison there gets the last word and it all ends happily for him (well, happily in the sense that what he doesn't know isn't hurting him). The allusion to the ending of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country might not be on quite so epic a scale as Kenny's final ascension in the movie, but in its own quiet way I find it every bit as moving.

One way or another, Mr Hat obviously did ditch Satan and find his way back to Garrison. That much is evident from how the series carried on, even if neither the movie or series cared to explicitly account for it. I'm also aware of how very silly it is to allow a matter so inconsequential to eat any kind of hole in you. So why does it continue to bother me?

 

Everything worked out...with a happy end?

Part of the problem is that it's not altogether clear where precisely in the series' chronology the events of the movie are intended to fall. I'm not sure if Parker and Stone have given any official confirmation on where they see BLaU as occurring, but from what we the viewers have to go on, we just know that it has to be some time between Season 2's "The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka" (which first set up the Satan-Saddam relationship) and the Season 4 two-parter "Do The Handicapped Go To Hell?" and "Probably" (which picked it up from where the movie left off). Bigger, Longer and Uncut hit US theatres on June 30th 1999, as Season 3 was roughly a third of the way through its run, and "Sexual Harassment Panda" was the first episode to air after its debut (on July 7th 1999), but I don't think that automatically makes it BLaU's immediate successor in terms of internal continuity. In my mind, BLaU takes place well before the entirety of Season 3. Sure, there are a handful of moments in Season 3 that were blatantly designed to coincide with BLaU's theatrical presence - "Cat Orgy" contained a shout-out to the film's most prominent box office competitor, the staggeringly brainless Will Smith vehicle Wild Wild West, while "Two Guys Naked In A Hot Tub" had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from Mole, a character otherwise exclusive to BLaU. But as to the contents of the movie itself, it seems more closely connected to what was going on in the second season, which is when I'm going to hazard a guess that it was scripted. Callbacks to the series are predominantly to Season 2, and to earlier Season 2 installments at that. The revelation from "Ike's Wee Wee" that Kyle's infant brother was Canadian-born proves significant, while Mr Mackey's naive and surface-level understanding of addiction from the same episode comes up again in his showstopper, "It's Easy, Mmmkay". A lot of the supporting kids in the movie are also quite vague and undefined, in a way that I'd associate with the first couple of seasons - Craig and Butters are still background characters, and I don't think Tweek (introduced in the penultimate episode of Season 2) shows up at all. But that's all very tenuous, right? Of course Kyle wasn't going to forget that his brother is Canadian (even if Sheila did), Mackey's well-intentioned condescension has long been one of his defining character traits, and when you've an extensive cast and only 80 minutes to spare, it is inevitable that not everybody is going to have a chance to stand out (heck, not even Pip, who at that point was one of the more established supporting child characters, got to be anything more than an extra in the movie). The critical detail that most firmly aligns BLaU with Season 2 would be the Saddam factor. He was kind of a looming figure in its opening stages, before just going quiet for a bit.

Saddam's appearance at the end of "The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka" was itself a continuity nod to the Terrance and Phillip special "Not Without My Anus", which had infamously aired in place of "Cartman's Mom Is Still A Dirty Slut", the much-anticipated follow-up to Season 1's closing cliffhanger, earlier that spring as an April Fools prank. (Note that when Sky 1 aired Season 2 in the UK, they did not attempt to replicate the trick and stuck "Not Without My Anus" on the tail-end as a weird little out of context extra, making it random as fuck when Saddam showed up in "Mexican Staring Frog", and with a Canadian accent to boot.) The term "continuity" might need to be applied quite loosely in this scenario, since "Not Without My Anus" was framed as a made-for-TV drama within the context of the South Park universe (albeit one purportedly based on a true story). The means by which Saddam met his demise in "Not Without My Anus" (suffocated by the farts of a stadium of flatulent Canadians) also differed from how he was later reported to have died within the movie (gored by a pack of wild boars), a discrepancy that I'm almost positive was due to them needing a concise explanation for the benefit of movie-goers who hadn't kept up with the series and would otherwise have been confused about why Saddam was in Hell (particularly with his real-life counterpart being alive at the time), and the events of "Not Without My Anus" being deemed too baffling and convoluted to recap at the start of BLaU. The series offers a curious intersection between these disparate continuities - in the episode "Probably", when Satan recounts to God the circumstances under which he met Saddam, he reaffirms the death by wild boars backstory, but also specifies that it happened in April, a nod to the original air date of "Not Without My Anus". It's also notable that in the movie itself, the featured events are explicitly stated to take place six weeks after Saddam's swine-inflicted death, which suggests that they would have fallen some time soon after "Mexican Staring Frog", if Saddam was established to already be dead within the internal timeline.

Now let's consider how Garrison and Mr Hat might specifically fit into this. In the series, Mr Hat was with Garrison from the very beginning up until the Season 6 episode "The Death Camp of Tolerance" when Garrison decided to officially retire him (sob). The only exception in between would be that aforementioned arc in the middle of Season 2 where he went AWOL for a few episodes and was temporarily replaced by Mr Twig. So...if you're determined to tie Mr Hat's supposed disappearance at the end of the movie with the continuity of the series, that's the only window you have. But is that even doable? Could this actually be the origin of that whole bizarre love triangle arc in Season 2, rather than merely a harrowing echo of it? Perhaps. There is a fan theory proposing that "Summer Sucks" should be seen as the direct successor to the events of BLaU, as awkward as it would seem to have to retroactively factor in the movie before an episode that debuted a whole year ahead of it. After all, that installment opens with Mr Hat having already absconded, and Garrison struggling to comprehend what's become of him. It would also be consistent with what the movie indicates about Saddam and where he goes within the series' timeline, with bonus points for the fact that if his death occurred in April, six weeks along would be taking us into the run-up into summer. The obvious bugbear of this theory, from my perspective, is that it requires you to overlook Mr Hat's reappearance with Garrison at the end of BLaU, which I am loath to do, but I think it's an intriguing notion nevertheless and that it merits consideration.

The trouble is that the background information regarding Saddam might ultimately hold more water with this reading than what actually happens with Garrison and Mr Hat in "Summer Sucks". There are certain narrative details it seems somewhat of a stretch to have to line up with the movie (notably, that in "Summer Sucks" Mr Hat specifically goes missing on the last day of school), but overall it's more of a tonal mismatch that I'm feeling. The circumstances behind Mr Hat's mysterious disappearance in "Summer Sucks" are implied to be quieter and more mundane (relatively speaking) than the high-stakes drama of the movie's climax. Garrison spends the episode grappling with a low-key but intensely personal crisis that, so far as he's concerned, completely overshadows the town's apocalypse of the week, an out-of-control black snake firework destroying everything in its path. His immediate assumption is that one of the children has stolen the puppet as a prank, though he later reflects, during his psychiatry session with Dr Katz, that Mr Hat might have walked out of his own accord, because of a disagreement they'd had earlier that morning. What they disagreed about is anybody's guess (and Garrison seemingly attached less significance to it than did Mr Hat, if it was really that much of an afterthought to him), and I'd argue that the story works as well as it does because it keeps the details to such a vague and understated level (making it the perfect companion to the wilder, more overblown A-story about the snake). We learn few of the particulars, like what inspired Mr Hat to go or how he was able to leg it in the absence of legs, a choice that accentuates the absurdity of the situation, but also the pathos. Garrison's loneliness becomes twofold. Not only has he been unceremoniously ditched by his emotional support puppet, the rest of the town takes little to no interest in his plight and can't even begin to understand what he's going through. Even the viewer isn't totally sure of what to make of it, with Katz's assessment insinuating that Garrison's testimony should be seen as unreliable, although toward the end we get a teasing glimpse into Mr Hat's side of the story, which corroborates at least some of what Garrison was saying. The puppet is revealed to have travelled to Green Bay, Wisconsin, apparently to live out his sexual fantasies involving Brett Favre (odds are that he succeeded, given that Favre seemed to be returning his interest). So if this does take place right after BLaU, then presumably he's already dumped Satan and is weighing up his options before going back to Garrison.

I do find it basically plausible that Parker and Stone might well have conceived the movie's conclusion first and then been inspired to do the whole arc in Season 2 where Garrison and Mr Hat spend several episodes estranged. On a conceptual level it certainly feels as though there could be some intersection, especially since they didn't land that far apart, all things considered. At any rate, it's an idea they did better justice to in the series, where they had a lot more time to explore its implications. And since Season 2 saw the light of day first, it makes the ending of BLaU feel kind of redundant as well as mean. Whatever Garrison did prior to "Summer Sucks" to drive Mr Hat away, he had suffered enough for it, and my feeling is that he'd earned the right to keep the puppet at his side uninterrupted for a few more seasons. So yes, I definitely understand the appeal of the theory. It takes what amounted to a joke and a loose end in the movie and allows it to have meaningful follow-up with a clear resolution in the series, in a way that doesn't feel as if it's rolling back on any prior development. I'm not sure that I buy the two premises as totally compatible, however. At most, I can see one idea giving rise to the other, but I'm not really sensing that they are one and the same. I don't subscribe to the theory, but I will make this one further observation about it. When Mr Hat finally returns to Garrison in "Chef Aid", Garrison is initially reluctant to take him back and throws him out the door, telling him to go to Hell. That's standard retaliation from Garrison (he said the same thing to Mackey in "Summer Sucks"), but it gives it a little extra resonance when you're watching it through the lens of Mr Hat having potentially already been there.

As I say, I'd rather not ignore the fact that Mr Hat IS with Garrison during the final sequence of BLaU. That is what my heart and my gut tell me to look toward, even if my brain is inevitably going to get in the way by asking questions. We've already discussed how the nature of Kenny's wish might potentially account for Mr Hat's return within the narrative, but since it's not acknowledged we can't be certain what's actually supposed to be going on, and that keeps me in such a queasy state of limbo when processing this ending. For that much I will forever curse South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, even as the "Uncle Fucka" sequence retains its devilish power to have me collapsing into fits of giggles. It is what it is nonetheless, and do we have any means of making sense of why the sequence plays out as it does? I suspect that I've given the matter more thought than anybody else on Earth, and as I see it there are three different possibilities we have to choose from.

The first is that Mr Hat's reappearance is indicative of something being cut from the final sequence (in spite of the film's innuendo-laden title, we know from the trailer alone that there was excised material). It's entirely possible that the epilogue was running on a little too long and needed to be trimmed down, and the solutions to Stan and Kyle's respective arcs would naturally take priority. In which case they might have taken out a follow-up moment with Mr Hat and Garrison and hoped that audiences would just roll with it. Irritating shortcuts will sometimes be taken (Pixar's Soul, for example, was meant to incorporate a sequence explaining Mr Mittens' survival that was ultimately excised, although they showed Mittens alive and well anyway, to the relief but also confusion of cat-loving audiences all over). Back in 1999, this is what I'd desperately hoped would turn out to be the case, but I don't think anything ever came of it.

The second is that Mr Hat being with Garrison in those two closing shots was an animation error that was somehow made twice over. This is by and far my least favourite possibility, since it makes that final glimmer of comfort a total fluke and suggests that the intentions of the film were a whole lot meaner, although it isn't completely unsalvageable, by virtue of the fact that it still happened. I'm of the opinion that there can be happy accidents. Just look to the ending of "World Wide Recorder Concert". When Garrison boards the bus in the final scene and gives his directions to Ms Crabtree, you might notice that Kenny is alive and seated in the background, despite having already been killed during the disastrous brown noise incident. While it wasn't entirely out of the question for Kenny to die and be immediately resurrected (it happened earlier that season as part of a meta joke in "Succubus"), my intuition here is that Kenny's return was indeed a mistake. Bugs in the visuals are to be expected from time to time. But you know what, I'm glad that he's there. I think the closing Undiscovered Country allusion is simply wonderful, and it strikes me as only right and proper that even Kenny was allowed to be a part of it. We can apply that same logic to BLaU. If nothing else, those final shots give the appearance of Garrison not being left alone at the end or excluded from the celebration, and that too seems only right and proper. If it was an honest error, then all I can say is, bless the inattentive animators who were responsible. Whatever they were paying you was not enough.

The third possibility is the one that I tend to lean toward nowadays, which is that Parker and Stone were straight-up trolling us. They worked that interaction between Satan and Mr Hat into the resolution because it amused them, but at this stage weren't actually looking to mess with the status quo and just stuck Mr Hat back with Garrison anyway, in stark defiance of any and all prospects of there being genuine consequences. The question of where precisely the movie is supposed to fall within with the series' timeline becomes irrelevant, because everything is reset at the end, the situation with Garrison and Mr Hat included. If anybody cared enough to get their knickers in a twist about the lack of explanation, then that would be hilarious, wouldn't it? I, unfortunately, was the easiest victim in the world. But hey, at least the outcome actually went in my favour, in terms of what I'd wanted to see happen. And the following year they gave us "World Wide Recorder Concert", which I wholeheartedly adore and see as compensating for any callous disregard Garrison might have received at the end of the movie, so it's all good.

Besides which, I've made the point twice already that a number of Mr Hat's most memorable moments were rooted in a degree of inexplicability. As is befitting a character who is a puppet of ambiguous autonomy. The question of how he managed to ditch Satan and get back to Garrison's hand at the end of BLaU will just have to be added to that same list. We all know that it wouldn't have worked out between Mr Hat and Satan anyway, in the same way that it ultimately didn't work out between him and Brett Favre. Mr Hat is a flirtatious son of a bitch, but Satan is so touchy-feely, and I could see that pissing Mr Hat off before long. Maybe his last-minute u-turn was entirely unrelated to Kenny's wish, and he just realised then and there that Satan really wasn't as hot as all that and he was getting out of the arrangement through his own volition. You underestimate those preternatural puppet powers at your own peril (unless of course you're Kathie Lee).

Skinamarink (aka Can We Sleep Downstairs Tonight?)

The thing that hurt me the most about Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink (2022) was how young its central characters were. Going in, this was something I was totally unprepared for. I'd known that the experimental Canadian horror was about two children who wake up in the dark of the night to find that their father has mysteriously absconded, as have all the windows and doors of their increasingly disorientating abode, but I'd had it it in mind that the nippers in question would be at least 10 or 11. Young enough that the sudden parental abandonment would horrify, but old enough that they wouldn't feel completely defenceless. But no, they're 4 and 6. Painfully callow beings to be caught up in so freakishly nightmarish a scenario. The imperilled pair, Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) and her smaller brother Kevin (Lucas Paul), have relatively little to say about their predicament, with most of their dialogue coming in hushed whispers so scarcely intelligible that subtitles are deployed throughout - but whenever they do open their mouths, the emotive impact is considerable. Every last peep out of them, every plaintive, half-hopeful plea of "Dad?" had me squirming, heightening my awareness of what tiny, terrified little tots these were. If children in jeopardy are a major sticking point for you, in particular children who've neither the vocabulary or the mental capacity to articulate the level of jeopardy they're in, then Skinamarink might not be your picture. 

Actually, the very first thing that had come to mind upon reading the synopsis for Skinamarink was the 1991 track "No Idea" by Earth Leakage Trip, an evocation that continued to niggle all throughout my viewing. Prominently sampled in "No Idea" is the 1975 children's record Happy Monsters, which tells the story of another pair of alliteratively-named children, Bobby and Betty, who seem to have crossed over into a parallel universe where the most mundane of architectural details become indicators of something profoundly askew. In their case, the doors and windows have not disappeared altogether, but are rearranged and out of place; on "No Idea", Bobby's observation that, "The doors are where the windows should be...and the windows are where the doors should be..." is looped and slowed to make him sound high as a kite (the track belonged to the "toytown techno" movement of the early 1990s, which proposed that childhood fantasy and rave drug culture were gateways to a common euphoria). Punctuating Bobby's stupefaction are the startled cries of Heather O'Rourke, as lifted from the 1982 film Poltergeist, interjecting that she cannot see where her mother has gone. The children are alone in a world in which the order has mysteriously shifted, and there is at once something tremendously terrifying and exhilarating in that prospect of slipping past the boundaries of parental control and into the dark unknown (the young ravers of 1991 certainly knew it). Ball's picture is grounded by a similar fascination, with the parents gone, the darkness looming and the familiar gradually giving way to the uncanny. Like "No Idea", it offers a beguiling journey into childhood nostalgia, but one that feels troubled and distorted, so as to emphasise the more sinister implications that were potentially omnipresent all along. The film's title is derived from a popular pre-school nonsense song, and the material comforts of juvenility are all around - the television glow and the cartoon entertainments therein are our guiding light, and the carpet is adorned with a variety of Fisher-Price toys - but these too become a part of the disturbance as the experience goes on, and the world is turned (literally, by the film's end) upside down. Ball also offers a fiendish inversion upon the expected conclusion of any nostalgic voyage, that you can never go home again, by stranding us in a predicament that is its exact opposite - apparently we could go home again, only for the home itself to turn against us and threaten to keep us from finding our way back to the present.

Skinamarink is not for everyone. It requires a lot of patience and, honestly, a love of the mundane. You have to love staring at the shadows on the walls and into the ill-lit spaces in which something might be stirring but relatively little ever reveals itself. You have to be willing to settle for atmospheric clout over narrative clarity. You must have a fascination for low-fidelity, and for the various specks and glitches that characterise "analog horror", the predominantly online media movement from which Skinamarink originates (Ball cut his film-making teeth with the YouTube channel "Bitesized Nightmares", creating shorts based on real dreams as recounted by internet commenters). If you have a particular weakness for hauntology, logophobia or VHS distortion (all those things that I lap up), then odds are that you'll be in your element. 

Despite its aggressively niche form, Skinamarink evokes what must be a near-universal childhood experience - waking up in the early hours to find that your house in the darkness becomes a very different place. It might not have literally turned upside down, but its entire character has been reversed, so that it's no longer a venue of safety, but a harbourer the unknown. Myself, I can recall a stretch from my childhood when my parents had a radio alarm clock with the most ungodly tone, which never seemed to rouse them but would never fail to get to me from the other end of the hallway. It got to the point where I had started to wake up well in advance of the alarm, and would lie awake in petrified anticipation of its imminent eruption. Everything about the scenario - the darkness, the stillness, the deceptive silence - was unbearable. I could not make out the clock on my own wall, nor did I particularly want to stare out into the void that engulfed my bedroom in the nocturnal hours, so I couldn't tell exactly how close we were to the tone's cacophonic assault. I simply knew that it was coming. And when it came, it was a choice between huddling under the duvet for however long it took for my parents to wake up and hit the snooze button (in which case it would strike again in 10 minutes) or braving a trip down that pitch black hallway to turn it off myself. Nine times out of ten, I was more afraid of the pitch blackness and whatever it might be concealing than I was the tone itself, so I lay there and endured it. Eventually, my parents changed the setting, so that the radio went off instead of the tone, and my sleep pattern improved dramatically.

Skinamarink could hardly be described as a found footage film, though it presents itself through the grain and crackle of a degraded tape, giving the impression that we are looking into some long-forgotten memory that could well be our own, and in which it becomes difficult to distinguish between what might be genuine movements in the shadows and what are mere blemishes on the image. The distortion is, we suppose, intended to represent the fuzziness and spottiness of memory, suggesting that Skinamarink might be interpreted as a document of irrational childhood fear and of a young mind's attempts to grapple with the incomprehensible. All the same, that the camera's perspective switches between that of Kevin and Kaylee and, more often still, does not show the perspective of either, makes it challenging to align the film's content with the subjective experience of any one character. For the most part, the camera takes a detached view, showing the corners of the house from various angles but rarely focussing on its subjects. Notably, we almost never get a clear view of any of the participants' faces (the single exception to this rule provides the film with one of its most unsettling images). What's seen of the children is mostly their feet, from the perspective of something that might be scrutinising them the carpet level, while chunks of their hushed dialogue feel overheard, by something that is not quite among them. At the same time, it was seldom my impression that we were seeing the action from the eye-view of the entity skulking around them, a la Steven Soderbergh's Presence (2024) - rather, it felt like a stylistic choice, to emphasise the vastness and the emptiness of the house, and the relative smallness and isolation of the children.

There is a certain timelessness to Skinamarink, in that it seems to exist out of time. An opening title card informs us that the events in question take place in 1995, and the protagonists accordingly use a VHS tape for their early-hours diversion, but the cartoons they watch are all from the 1930s, themselves artefacts of a bygone age that would have seemed alien in the film's own purported setting. Specifically, the cartoons are all from the public domain, which from a practical standpoint spared Ball from having to deal with copyright, but it also serves as another important aesthetic choice, imbuing the film's ambience with a surreal, otherworldly quality that feels evocative of a dream or an alternate reality. The television becomes a further space in which the familiar intersects with the unfamiliar - one cartoon, Chuck Jones' Prest-O Chang-O (1939), features an uncanny leporine character who is in actuality a primitive Bugs Bunny. The cartoons themselves do not feel arbitrary; a popular interpretation has it that they are windows into the nature of the children's predicament, and the unknown they are up against. It has been noted, for example, that one cartoon, The Cobweb Hotel (1936), is about a predatory being (a ghoulish spider) trapping unsuspecting prey (flies) under the thinly-veiled guise of hospitality. Another, Somewhere In Dreamland (1936), includes the sung refrain, "Somewhere in Dreamland tonight",  which could be taken as either an ironic dig at the film's insomnious aura, and at the inability to find escapism in dreaming, or an indication that the children have entered into a state of unreality - perhaps the sleeping and waking worlds have become blurred (there is a reference to Kevin sleepwalking at the start of the film). Then there's Bimbo's Initiation (1931), which shows the title character futilely attempting to escape a surreal house through an endless succession of doors. Of greatest interest to myself, however, was the Fleischer Studios short The Song of The Birds (1935), which is featured in two chunks, the first of which comes shortly after Kaylee asks a question that drastically challenges our understanding of the family's domestic situation: "Why is Mom crying?" So far as we can tell, the children's mother had already vacated the house before the father's mysterious disappearance; the children do not call out for her when discovering that they have been left alone. A little later, Kevin asks if their dad might have gone to the same place as their mom, and Kaylee insists that she no longer wants to talk about her mother. The initial mention of Mom takes us into The Song of The Birds, in which darkness is equated with mourning, as the animated birds prepare to bury one of their fallen, a juvenile bird shot by a boy's pellet gun. It is hard to shake the impression that the mother may be deceased, even with Kaylee's question appearing to place her within the present, and in the immediate vicinity. It could be that they are haunted by her memory, with the endless night representing their unprocessed trauma and grief. Still, what makes the inclusion of The Song of The Birds particularly intriguing is that we do actually see the short's redemptive ending (this is in contrast to say, The Cobweb Hotel, in which we are not shown the scenes in which the flies rise up against the spider). For the grieving birds, dawn eventually comes. The wounded bird is revived, and they make peace with their remorseful tormentor, who discards his gun and dispenses birdseed. Of course, this is glimpsed through distorted VHS flicker, in which the triumph of the birds is unmistakable, but the radiance of the new morn comes in a washed-out reddish hue, and the final image where the boy winks reassuringly at the camera is rendered too bright to see. 

The mother is clearly a touchy subject for the children, and Kaylee's discomfort at discussing her whereabouts is indicative of some lingering family discomfort. There are multiple sections of Skinamarink that seem highly suggestive of a subtext of domestic abuse, although how the mother fits in with this is not obvious - was she a victim, a perpetrator or both? The various theories put forth by viewers range from the mother walking out on the family, having a history of self-harm and potentially taking her own life, or being abused and ultimately murdered by the father. We are perhaps primed to distrust the father from the start of the film, when he is heard discussing an injury sustained by Kevin which he attributes to his falling down the stairs while sleepwalking (it is, though, unclear to whom the father would be speaking at this time of night, if not the mother). During the initial clip from The Song of The Birds, the children are disturbed by a loud banging sound, redolent of some violent altercation occurring elsewhere in the house, and turn to find that a chair has uprooted and positioned on the ceiling; the process of domestic upheaval is truly underway. The mother should not be there, and yet she continues to haunt the household, whether as a literal apparition or as a symbol of that unexpressed trauma. In one of the film's most infamous scenes Kaylee is summoned to the upstairs bedroom to find that her father has apparently returned, and sitting at the opposite end of the bed is her mother, with her back to Kaylee. In another scene we see a more intimate shot of a long-haired woman from behind, presumably the mother. Toward the end of the film a similar female figure is seen from the distance, appearing to dissolve away into the grainy backdrop. If we see the clips from The Song of The Birds as being somehow representative of the children's relationship with their ghostly mother, then we might consider the possibility that the mother is the one in mourning - that she is crying, as Kaylee puts it, for the plight of her children, much as the parent birds in the cartoon are weeping for their unresponsive young offspring, who is seemingly fated to be buried in darkness.

It is, we suspect, a darkness of the parents' own making. Some viewers have interpreted the scene where Kaylee encounters her mother and father in the bedroom, positioned with their backs to one another (although never visible at the same time), as an indicator of divorce - the mother's assurance that she and the father love Kaylee very much seems evocative of something a parent might be expected say in such a position - and the broader picture as an allegory for the emotional turmoil faced by children having to deal with such a significant reordering of their domestic arrangement. Divorce, however, seems too tame and ordinary a predicament to account for the genuine peril these children have to contend with. The mother's subsequent instruction to Kaylee to close her eyes suggest that something more sinister is unfolding. Kaylee complies (for this scene, the camera reflects her point of view, so the audience too is plunged into momentary darkness) and opens her eyes to find her mother gone, although she continues to talk to Kaylee, warning her that "there's someone here", before the sounds of crunching are heard. Is the mother undergoing some sort of terrifying transformation (suggesting that she is becoming the abuser), or is something else crunching her (suggesting that she is a victim of domestic abuse)? Soon after the bedroom encounter, Kaylee is removed from the equation; Kevin locates her in the basement with her eyes and mouth blanked out on her face, and is thereafter left on his own (until now, the children have drawn comfort and solidarity from one another, so their separation comes as a particularly grim turn of events). A strange disembodied voice starts to talk to Kevin from the darkness and admits to taking away Kaylee's mouth as a punishment. Curiously, it says nothing about her eyes, but we might implicitly link their removal to the mother's prior instruction that she keep them closed. We might see a similar connection when, in the film's most distressing development, the voice challenges Kevin to play a "game" that involves inserting a knife into his eye (he complies, and his inevitable reaction recalls that at the start of the film when he suffers his head injury). The entity prefers the children not to see, much as the mother prefers them not to see. There is a running theme of the children being required to look away, and to shut out whatever traumas are going on around them. In another scene, the voice commands Kevin to "sleep", followed by a thud in which he seemingly passes out on the floor.

The entity, a manifestation of what is unspeakable, has seemingly arrived to fill the void left by the parents. It is the new authority to which they must answer, claiming to have punished Kaylee because she persisted in asking for her mother and father. Yet there is a definite paradox in the character of the entity; it dispenses discipline when the children won't do as they are told, and its malevolent insistence on eliminating their vision echoes the more covertly sinister actions of the parents. But in various other respects it has the personality of a child. As Kevin sits on the floor fiddling with his Lego blocks, it repeatedly tells him that it wants to play (said with all the benignity of John Kramer), raising the possibility that its rearranging of the house amounts to some form of erratic play-pretence with what, from its perspective, are all just pieces of Lego at its disposal. The entity is a creative being that delights in subverting the established order, affixing chairs to the ceiling and toys to the wall. With its love of cartoons, and of taking disobedient children's mouths away, it also feels uncannily reminiscent of the omnipotent Anthony in the "It's A Good Life" segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (a remake of the classic episode from 1961), who punished one of his sisters for insubordination by removing her mouth and another by banishing her into the cartoon world (notably, Bimbo's Initiation is featured in both films). On that note, it also seems significant that both the victim and aggressor of The Song of The Birds are children; unlike the spider from The Cobweb Hotel, the pellet-firing boy seems less malevolent than he does misguided. He shoots at the birds because he sees it as a game; only the prospect of having mortally wounded the young bird manages to convince him otherwise. Alas, Kevin's injury does not bring out the same compassion in the entity, despite its assurances that it will protect him. Is it offer of protection another of its tricks, or does it reflect the parents' childish delusion that what the children cannot see and are prevented from acknowledging cannot hurt them

In The Song of The Birds, it is seemingly an act of divine intervention that saves the injured bird, when rain falls out of the sky and revives it. It is, nonetheless, the compassion of the boy that facilitates this - unable to shut out the birds' suffering any longer, he gets down on his knees and prays, calling on the assistance of a higher power. The happy outcome at the end of the cartoon was thus dependent on the mercy of the omnipotent, but also the final refusal of the boy to turn a blind eye to the trauma happening outside of his window and his resolve to address it. His willingness to throw the gun he had wielded so childishly aside and to become a caregiver to the birds, nourishing them with birdseed, suggests that he has undergone a growth and maturation that is ultimately redemptive. Such an outcome is unattainable in Skinamarink, where the omnipotent have no mercy, those who refuse to turn a blind eye are literally blinded, and growth and maturation is cruelly denied the children within. Shortly after his eye injury, Kevin discovers the will to try phoning the emergency services, and his resolve does appear to momentarily conquer the obstacles - despite the phone lines being down earlier, he is able to get through to an operator this time. The operator praises him for being a brave boy, suggesting that he is undergoing a redemptive growth of his own, only for the entity to ultimately thwart him by transforming the telephone into a toy one, specifically a Chatter Telephone, an anthropomorphised rotary phone manufactured by Fisher-Price. The message is clear - Kevin cannot be allowed to grow up and will stay imprisoned in helplessness of youth. The Chatter Telephone is another detail that seems to defy any clear sense of time, for it has remained a popular childhood icon since its creation in 1961. Even if you never had one growing up, odds are that you are familiar with the toy from its appearance in Toy Story 3 (2010).

What amuses me about the Chatter Telephone's appearance in Skinamarink is how deftly it plays into what was everyone's first instinct on seeing the trailer for Toy Story 3 - that something with a face that uncanny was not to be trusted. I distinctly remember the build-up to the Pixar sequel and what a common assumption it was that Chatter Telephone would be one of the villains. In part because his line, "You and your friends ain't ever getting out of here", was taken out of context in the marketing and sounded like an unambiguous threat, but moreover because his appearance just didn't seem that friendly. What a surprise it was when the film arrived and it turned out we'd all misjudged the little ringer on wheels. His method of communicating (exclusively through his receiver without moving his lips) while inspired, gave off a somewhat sinister vibe, but he was 100% on the level and gave Woody some helpful pointers on evading Lotso's clutches. In Skinamarink the toy (another manifestation of the entity) serves a very different purpose - not only does it signify Kevin's entrapment in this permanent childhood nightmare, it later plays a fiendish trick on him, when Kevin sees the eyes of the phone in the darkness, accompanied by the sounds of snarling, and shines his flash light on it. The monster he'd imagined skulking in the shadows is revealed to be a run of the mill toy...which subsequently reveals itself to be more terrifying in the light than in the darkness. Its eyes shift, its mouth contorts, and it emits a piercing noise about as comforting as that alarm clock tone I described earlier. Kevin apparently decides it was more palatable as a pair of predatory eyes in the shadows, and takes the flash light off of it.

(Spoilers follow) 

The Toy Story connection feels more pertinent than perhaps first meets the eye, for the fate that awaits Kevin seems hauntingly reminiscent of the problem facing Woody and co, destined never to grow old and to stay mired within the realm of childhood as their owners inevitably move on and abandon them. Kevin is reduced to the status of a toy. In the film's third act, he is summoned upstairs by the voice and, in a manoeuvre that would certainly appeal to the denizens of the strange parallel world from Happy Monsters, the floor is now where the ceiling should be and the ceiling is where the floor should be. Kevin is prompted to keep moving through his inverted environs, until we come across a mountain of toys, mostly the Lego blocks he was playing with earlier, suspended on the ceiling. Onscreen text would appear to indicate that 572 days have now passed, a punchline recycled from Ball's 2020 short Heck (the evolutionary ancestor of Skinamarink), which reveals that its protagonist has been stranded in a similar inertia for "18694 sleeps" (in his case, that's more than 51 years, dependent on what length of time a "sleep" is meant to imply). Does this mean that it has been 572 days since the darkness first descended on the children, or is that specifically how long Kevin has been stuck there on the ceiling with the other pieces of misplaced Lego? Either way, how many days' worth of time had already elapsed before Kaylee was taken out of the picture? Have the children aged at all within that time? Is it safe assume that we've arrived in 1997 by now, or has it been that same night in 1995 for all eternity? Kevin's entrapment in that endless corridor, which seems to stretch out into infinity (and beyond) implies that he is suspended in some kind of limbo; he has been tidied away with the other toys, with the entity having seemingly grown bored with him as a plaything. Stifled and helpless, he has no means of progressing, no way of conquering the childhood demons that have become the be-all and end-all of his entire universe. This is the epitome of his abandonment, with the upturned dollhouse in the toy collection echoing the house's disruption and suggesting that the process of domestic upheaval that was triggered by the family's unspoken turmoil is now complete.

Soon after, we are presented with a sequence that is (for my money) all the more disturbing, centring on the framed still photographs that adorn the walls of the house, all of which are of children. They might pass for perfectly ordinary family photos, but for the fact that the children's facial features have been obscured, recalling the subjugation of Kaylee, and in some cases their heads are missing altogether. A natural assumption would be that the images depict Kaylee and Kevin at even earlier points in their short lives; their modification could be indicative of a temporal disconnection, as Kevin's memory of his former life erodes and he is fractured off into an inertia that exists without past or future. Alternatively, it might be suggestive of the historic traumas that have assured the destruction of Kaylee and Kevin across a longer period of time. A more terrifying possibility still is that the pictured children are not Kaylee and Kevin at all, but other victims of this same process, indicating that the story we've seen is in no way unique. Another way of putting it is that this house is, in an allegorical sense, made out of gingerbread, and these children were already eaten by the witch that lurks within - for, in Ball's own words, "If people pay attention, they see it's basically a Hansel and Gretel story."

 

In the most familiar version of the classic German tale, Hansel and Gretel fall into the clutches of a witch after being abandoned in the wilderness by their father, though he does so reluctantly, at the insistence of the children's vicious stepmother. The children ultimately defeat the witch and return to their father to find that the stepmother has been conveniently disposed of in their absence; the vanquishing of the witch implicitly precipitates that of the stepmother, suggesting that, for all intents and purposes, the two are one and the same. If we are to read Skinamarink as a retelling of this story, we might take that as a clue that the children's mother is dead before the picture begins and, furthermore, that the "mother" Kaylee encounters in the bedroom is not really her lingering spectre, but an imposter, in likelihood another of the entity's deceptions. We would, however, do well to keep in mind that in the earliest editions of the story presented by the Brothers Grimm, it was the children's biological mother who expelled them from the home. This was later superseded by the narrative of the wicked stepmother, which proved more enduring - for it is easier to attribute corruption and abandonment to an interloping evil than to reckon with the possibility of it arising from within, among those we'd trust to love and protect us. The narrative is a smokescreen, much like the mother's insistence that Kaylee keep her eyes closed, designed to shield us from some unpalatable reality. And how easily does it really sit with us that, even in the most oft-told version of the story, the biological father bends to the will of the stepmother and abandons the children, even if they are reconciled at the end? Is there such a world of difference between a parent who promises protection and leaves his children to die in the woods and a witch who promises gingerbread and lights up a cooking pot?

The prospect of the witch and parents being parallels of one another, if not outright the same, makes the film's closing implication particularly unsettling. In the final sequence, we return to what is presumably Kevin's perspective once more, scanning the grainy blackness until our gaze falls upon the outline of a figure standing above us. The figure looks vaguely human, and like an adult, but it is hard to tell, not least because its facial features are (of course) obscured. We can just about discern its lips moving, and the words that come out are the predictable ones - we are told to go to sleep. The film thus leaves us at a point of delicious ambiguity; it is unclear if it signals the end of the nightmare, with Kevin (and by extension, ourselves) awakening from a bad dream to the parental reassurance that nothing wrong is really happening (as hollow as such reassurances might sound), or our continued entrapment, as our captor subdues us to a bad reality that is basically inescapable. Exacerbating our unease is that we cannot be certain if we are in the presence of one of Kevin's parents, be it his mother or his father, or the entity. Kevin, for his part, does not seem sure either. He asks the figure to identify itself, and receives no answer. In practice it might make little difference. If we've escaped the witch but have only dubious guardians to run to, aren't we merely headed back to square one?

Bundles of Joyce: Meet The Robinsons (aka And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird)

Disney's 2007 offering Meet The Robinsons in some respects represents the studio at its most downtrodden. It is certainly telling that it resorts to a device rarely seen in the studio's canon, which is to end with a quote from Walt Disney himself: "Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious...and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." Shorn from this quote is the additional information clarifying that Walt was specifically talking about the approach at WED Enterprises. Retained is that rather awkward "however", making it clear that this was part of some wider conversation to which we are not here privy. Instead, there is the implicit invitation to attach our own meaning to "however", and to what wider conversation the minds behind Meet The Robinsons might themselves have been responding to. It's no secret that the 2000s were not auspicious years for Disney. The Renaissance of the 1990s had given way into the Dork Age, with most of their animated features either outright flopping or earning only modest totals. Meanwhile, the box office was dominated by a new breed of animated feature; the age of 3D animation had arrived in full force, with it being largely a two horse race between Pixar and DreamWorks for dominion of the industry. Disney, who for decades had had the luxury of being effectively the only game in town when it came to big league Hollywood animation (Don Bluth's 1980s challenge notwithstanding), were suddenly finding themselves left in the dust. Having made the controversial decision to ditch hand-drawn animation altogether and to pivot to 3D, they'd done little restore their credibility when the first product of this bid for renewed relevance was the ghastly Chicken Little (2005) - a modest success that instantly cemented its reputation as one of the most loathed entries in the Disney canon. Meet The Robinsons knew that it faced an uphill battle when it came to both winning over the general public and convincing the Disney enthusiasts that the old magic hadn't gone away, and as such that closing nugget of Walt wisdom could be seen as an earnest plea for audiences to bear with the studio as it sought to regain its footing in a changing industry. Alternatively, it could have been interpreted as a massive middle finger to the devotees who favoured traditional animation and were disappointed at how quick Disney were to write off their legacy and jump on the 3D bandwagon. In light of everything that was happening at the time, I can see why that final title might have rubbed some people the wrong way, if it came across as taking Walt's words out of context to support their new computer-animated agenda. Not to mention that Disney could hardly take credit for "opening new up doors" when they were simply stumbling down a trail that Pixar, DreamWorks and Blue Sky had already blazed. They weren't exactly selling us on the notion that this was the best possible future.

Personally, I am not so cynical as to suppose that this was the intention. I don't believe that the quote in question was meant as a commentary (at least, not a conscious one) on the studio's abandonment of 2D animation. Nevertheless, its inclusion does betray a fundamental lack of confidence on the film-makers' part - an admission that, yes we know that we're asking our audiences to go along with a lot, but look, this is exactly in the spirit of the old Disney. It is meant to convey a sense of playful optimism, but there is a distinct whiff of scepticism about it, a feeling that the film couldn't be left to speak for itself and needed the pseudo-endorsement of Walt to lend it authenticity. I would rather that it wasn't there at all. Because Meet The Robinsons shouldn't have doubted itself. It's no masterpiece, but it holds up remarkably strongly for a film that emerged from such a shaky and uncertain time in the studio's history. I speak as someone who was so dismayed by the direction Disney was taking in the 2000s that I chose to sit out the theatrical run of Meet The Robinsons altogether. It certainly had a lot to bounce back from. Brother Bear (2003) and Home on The Range (2004) were the products of palpably low morale, while Chicken Little was a gruesomely misguided attempt to ape the lucrative DreamWorks model. I wasn't expecting Meet The Robinsons to break the streak; based on word of its troubled production, and on its madcap trailer, I'd envisioned it being something of a mess. And, in a manner of speaking, it was. But it was a mess in the best possible way, one fully in keeping with a philosophy expressed in the film: "From failing you learn; from success, not so much." Meet The Robinsons might not be top tier, but it feels more authentic than other Disney products of its era, being willing to experiment and to go to more offbeat places in order to find new direction. It is a greatly more idiosyncratic piece than the succeeding Bolt (2008), a film structurally more polished but also doggedly averse to anything resembling risk or originality. I will be clear that I remain, above all, a 2D animation devotee, and think that Disney's treatment of it was lamentable. Nevertheless, I now have little trouble in declaring Meet The Robinsons to be the studio's second best entry of the decade, topped only by The Emperor's New Groove (seeing how Lilo & Stitch has so lethally debased itself, as of 2025).

The quality I can most admire about Meet The Robinsons is the sizeable extent to which it actually feels like something of a personal project. There is a real beating heart to the picture in a way not seen at Disney since the debased Lilo & Stitch. Somebody cared about getting this particular story told. I'm not sure that it was necessarily William Joyce's story, as related in his 1990 publication A Day with Wilbur Robinson, that they were particularly passionate about bringing to an audience. But they cared about what they had in Meet The Robinsons.

For an idea of how challenging and drawn out this film's development was, plans for a big screen version of A Day with Wilbur Robinson had been gestating at Disney since before the book itself was even commercially available. Film producer Bill Borden, a personal friend of Joyce, was given access to a proof copy and suggested that Disney might be interested in optioning it for a feature adaptation. Joyce wrote a treatment and pitched it, with the intention that it be adapted as a live action film and that it stay true to the book's timescale of taking place within a single day. He then set about drafting several different scripts while a variety of big name directors were courted - Joyce's top picks were Steven Spielberg and George Miller, with Peter Jackson, Francis Ford Coppola and Diane Keaton also being considered, but all to no avail. According to Borden, there was a prevailing sentiment that a live action children's film involving singing frogs and flying saucers would be too costly and impractical an undertaking for the era. The project stalled and languished in Development Hell for several years, until Disney executive Leo Chu managed to revitalise it by re-envisioning it as an animated production. From there, Joyce and Borden's input lessened, with Dorothy McKim taking over as producer, Jon Bernstein being assigned to write a brand new script and Stephen Anderson, a story supervisor on Brother Bear, coming in to helm the project in his directorial debut. In their hands, the plot underwent some drastic changes, with the Robinsons becoming a retro futuristic family in the vein of The Jetsons, and the pivotal conflict switching to an orphan's quest to find his place in the world. The latter development especially resonated with Anderson, who was himself adopted as a child and felt an affinity with the young protagonist Lewis.

Even with the project finally off of the ground, its path to completion remained a rocky one. When Pixar's chief creative officer John Lasseter was appointed to power at Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2006 he was infamously dissatisfied with how the feature was shaping up and ordered a major overhaul. It's reported that, under Lasseter's guidance, 60% of the film was scrapped and reworked (although Joyce disputes this). I previously prodded Blue Sky's Epic for having five credited writers, a sign of a torturous number of rewrites, but Meet The Robinsons has seven. As a knock-on effect of the protracted production schedule, Lewis wound up being voiced by two separate young actors, with the initial choice, Daniel Hansen, having already hit puberty by the time Lasseter's revisions were required. A sound-alike was located in Jordan Fry, a name that sounds oddly familiar to me for some reason. Great Caesar's ghost, could it be? Actually, I'd known at the time that Lewis was to be voiced by the same young actor who'd played a note-perfect Mike Teavee in the then-recent Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, and I did consider seeing the film at least out of support for Fry, but in the end my Disney fatigue was just too insurmountable. I consider it a really neat bit of career progression, because in some respects Lewis's story plays like a warmer variation on that of Mike as portrayed by Fry. There is quite a bit of thematic overlap between the two characters. Both are highly precocious children whose talents go unappreciated by the adults around them, but the role of Mike Teavee obviously requires that to be played with an angrier edge, and the story doesn't favour him. With Lewis the prospect of being young, intelligent and out of step is framed more positively, and he finds the connection and understanding that Mike was ultimately denied (Mike, though, remains the juicier character). 

Time has not been especially kind to Meet The Robinsons, in spite of its merits. Heck, 2007 was not overly kind to it. Critical reception was lukewarm, and its box office intake was substantially weaker than that of Chicken Little (a film that, while it outgrossed most of their recent 2D output, didn't meet Disney's expectations as a Pixar killer). On the plus side, it didn't amass anywhere near the level of disdain that its predecessor did, but then my mind inevitably goes to that immortal line from The Picture of Dorian Gray: "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." As it stands, Meet The Robinsons is one of those Disney films with something of a non-reputation, along with most of the package features, Fantasia 2000 and my dear sweet Oliver & Company. People rarely acknowledge its existence at all - not least Disney themselves, who didn't even include the film as part of a retrospective in the closing credits of their 2023 feature Wish. It sort of fell through the cracks where zeitgeist was concerned. I'm sure I wasn't the only person experiencing Disney fatigue at the time. Maybe people were reluctant to embrace Disney's new direction, particularly after Chicken Little. Maybe the glut of CG animated product across the decade meant that the technique's novelty was waning and that audiences were getting choosier about which features they gave their money to. Or maybe the marketing was simply too cluttered (that girl from the science fair who is a blatant bootleg of Wednesday Addams isn't a major character or one of the Robinsons, so what was she doing on the poster?), too confusing or else just too unimaginative.

This particular piece of marketing was inspired though.

It's important to keep in mind that Meet The Robinsons represented something of a learning curve for Disney. They were adjusting to the process of computer animation and trying to find a new identity post-Renaissance, and were lagging behind some of their contemporaries in both regards. Tonally and aesthetically, Meet The Robinsons is a lot less sophisticated than Pixar's Ratatouille; when you compare the two, it's a little startling to contemplate that they even came out within the same year, Pixar's film is so many leaps and bounds ahead. I doubt it would be at all controversial if I called Meet The Robinsons the worst-looking of the three major Joyce adaptations. It is a rough, rough little picture. But it's also the Joyce adaptation for which I feel the greatest personal affection. It's a film about finding the value in imperfection, a point it makes so convincingly that its lack of polish becomes a part of its appeal. 

What is A Day with Wilbur Robinson about? 

A Day with Wilbur Robinson is narrated in the first-person, from the perspective of an unnamed child who goes to spend a day (and a night) at the house of his friend Wilbur Robinson. He is greeted at the door by Wilbur and the family's butler Lefty (an octopus), and taken out into the garden, where they encounter Wilbur's parents scanning the lawn with a matter detector, helped by their robot assistant Carl. Mr Robinson explains that they are searching for Grandfather's false teeth, which have gone missing...and, come to think of it, they're not too sure where Grandfather is either. The narrator and Wilbur join in the search, exploring the vast, slightly surreal halls of the Robinson abode and encountering eccentric relative after eccentric relative. Aunt Billie plays with life-sized trains, Cousin Pete keeps pet tigers, Uncle Judlow uses a brain augmentor to boost his thought processes, Cousin Laszlo floats around by means of an anti-gravity device, Uncle Art travels in a flying saucer, etc. Eventually Grandfather is located in his science lab, training his band of musically-inclined frogs with the help of his friends, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, but the whereabouts of his teeth remain a mystery. Come evening the family sits down to each a spaghetti dinner, with Uncle Gaston, the cannon enthusiast, firing meatballs out of his miniature cannon. Soon after, Grandfather's false teeth are located in the mouth of one of the frogs. The family celebrate with a pillow fight, before Uncle Art regales them with stories of his adventures in outer space, and the frogs serenade them to sleep with violins. The following morning, the narrator bids the Robinsons farewell and goes his own way. Looking back over his shoulder, he sees Wilbur shooting himself out of Uncle Gaston's cannon, holding up a sign that reads: "See Ya Later, Pal."

The story is related in a comically deadpan fashion, with the Robinsons' eccentricities often understated within the text. For example, Billie is simply described as "playing with her train set" and Pete as "walking the cats", with the illustrations filling in the more unusual details of the trains being life-sized and the cats in question being tigers. Lefty, likewise, is not identified as an octopus, and when Art arrives in his flying saucer, we are told that he has come in from abroad. Uncles Spike and Dmitri, who first greet the narrator at the door, are actually hiding out in a couple of plant pots, a detail the narrator similarly takes in his stride.

 

How much of this is in Meet The Robinsons? 

Meet The Robinsons is a more faithful adaptation of its source book than is Epic of The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs...in the sense that it's actually about the same characters that were in the book. A bunch of them, at any rate. One member of the Robinson clan who is conspicuously absent from Disney's take is Mr Robinson - he's been replaced by another character, for the sake of accommodating a brand new plot twist. Also excised are Uncle Pete and his tigers (what? why wouldn't you want to include the tigers?) and Uncle Judlow and his brain augmentor. Wilbur's older sisters, Tallulah and Blanche, have been combined into a single character, named Tallulah, who is now Wilbur's cousin (having Wilbur be an only child makes that new plot twist a whole lot simpler). Some new additions include Uncle Fritz and Aunt Petunia (the latter of whom is actually a puppet operated by the former), Uncle Joe, who never leaves his easy chair and gets no discernible dialogue, and Wilbur's grandmother Lucille. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong do not appear.

It's probably fair to say that the film plays homage to the book more than it does outright adapt it, with certain details being implemented as quick nods to Joyce's creation before moving swiftly along. For example, the search for Grandfather Robinson's teeth still occupies a chunk of the middle act, and is resolved in the same manner, with the teeth showing up in one of the singing frogs (trained by Mrs Robinson in this version), but is here a minor distraction rather than a major plot motivator. A Day with Wilbur Robinson is not a rousing adventure story like The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs, but a slice of life yarn about a remarkable family who do not see themselves as so remarkable, and who enjoy spending time together. It has no villain and the main source of conflict (those misplaced teeth) is a totally benign one. In expanding it to feature length, the nature of Joyce's story has been changed fundamentally, transforming it into an altogether busier narrative about time travel and space age technology, with the Robinson family being recontextualised as a futuristic family from the year 2037 (a year that, eep, doesn't seem anywhere near as distant now as it did back in 2007). We thus get an implicit explanation for the family's singularities - they are simply from another time, and what's normal to them would naturally bamboozle someone from the dawn of the century.

Something Meet The Robinsons is not able to carry across is the big running gag of Joyce's book, where Wilbur will intermittently acknowledge that the narrator has happened to stop by on an unusually boring day at the Robinson household, sparking the reader's imagination as to what life for this family could possibly look like on an exciting day. Lewis's reactions are also a lot less deadpan; in the book, it was clear that the narrator was a regular guest at the Robinson abode, and as such was unfazed by what he found within, but his film counterpart is required to find it freaky and unfamiliar. Hence, he's terrified to be greeted by Lefty at the door, and he explicitly questions if Billie's trains are really toys. In an illuminating interview with Slash Film, Joyce admitted that he missed this aspect in Disney's film, noting that in his story it was a matter of, "this is how they live, this is what they do. They were much more like the family in "The Philadelphia Story," Katharine Hepburn's family. Just breezy and sophisticated and unflappable. And the Robinsons in the animated film are a little more goofy." The script still is, nevertheless, able to slip in the odd concession to the idea that the Robinsons don't perceive themselves as being terribly strange. The film's equivalent of the spaghetti dinner sequence (where Gaston still fires meatballs from his cannon, only here it plays out as a pastiche of the chopsocky cinema that Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill had recently brought into the mainstream), is followed by Lewis asking Art if dinners with the Robinsons are always like this. Art calmly responds, "No, yesterday we had meatloaf." 

 

So what is Meet The Robinsons about?

Meet The Robinsons tells the story of Lewis (Hansen/Fry), a twelve-year-old orphan who as a baby was abandoned by his mother on the steps of a children's home (a moody opening sequence that recalls the low-key sombreness of the similarly orphaned Penny in the prelude to The Rescuers). Precocious and with a flair for devising radical (albeit malfunctioning) inventions, Lewis has a hard time endearing himself to potential adoptive parents, and believes that his only hope of finding a family would be to locate and reconnect with his biological mother. He comes up with his most ambitious creation to date, a machine that scans a subject's brain and extracts information from their subconscious memories, with the intention of using it to remember what his mother looked like. While presenting the invention at his school's science fair, he is approached my a mysterious boy named Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman), who claims to have waltzed in from the future to warn him of an impending ambush from a sinister figure identified as the "Bowler Hat Guy" (director Steve Anderson). When Lewis's memory scanner spectacularly malfunctions (owing to the covert interventions of the Bowler Hat Guy), Lewis loses all confidence in himself, but is enticed by Wilbur into taking a trip in a time machine to the year 2037, so he can prove that he is who he says he is and convince Lewis to return to the fair and fix his scanner. Lewis, though, is far less interested in Wilbur's agenda than he is in using the time machine to head to the past and intervene in his mother's abandonment of him; they get into an argument and break the time machine, leaving Lewis stranded in the future, where he has little choice but to acclimatise to life with Wilbur's oddball family while endeavouring to repair the machine. In the meantime, the Bowler Hat Guy has followed them into the future, intending to abduct Lewis and find out how the memory scanner works so that he might pass the invention off as his own.

It is revealing that the film's middle act, which is the part that's most like Joyce's book, ends up being its weakest. Anderson was clearly nowhere near as invested in bringing Joyce's characters to the screen as he was in telling the new story that had been crafted around Lewis, chiefly because it was Anderson's story, more or less. Growing up as an adopted child, Anderson had eagerly awaited the day he turned 18, so that he could access his birth records and discover who his biological family were. Then, when he'd reached his mid-20s, it crossed his mind that he'd never gotten round to it, and he reflected on what had changed his priorities. In part, it was because he was happy with the family he had, but also because he was now more focussed on where he was going than where he had come from, and the future we was building at Disney animation. I do not know if Anderson ever did look up the details of his birth parents or make contact with them, but it hadn't proved as integral to his sense of identity or belonging as he'd long assumed. Lewis's journey to that same realisation feels authentic and heartfelt, since there clearly was a passion and conviction behind it stemming from Anderson's experience. By contrast, the movie comes to a near-total standstill when we get to the part where we're obligated to spend time with the Robinsons. It becomes no longer a matter of hanging out with the Robinsons for the joy of hanging out's sake, but an awkward road stop in between a story that feels bigger and more urgent. It doesn't help that the majority of the household are narrative dead weight. As a collective, they might embody the lively, jostling family atmosphere that's missing in Lewis's life, but the only ones who really matter, in story terms, are Wilbur, Mrs Robinson, the grandparents and Carl the robot.

The film's most successful character is the one who was apparently the greatest source of contention when Lasseter entered the picture, which is the Bowler Hat Guy. Lasseter thought him too much of a wimp to convince as the antagonist, and suggested making him a more serious threat. Anderson was resistant to the idea, but a compromise was eventually reached whereby the hat itself (artificially intelligent and named Doris) was revealed to be the nefarious brains behind the operation, with Bowler Hat Guy becoming more of a comic foil. He remains a very non-traditional Disney villain, with a lot more of Team Rocket in him than Jafar or Lady Tremaine. The most comparable rogue in Disney's own gallery would be Edgar from The Aristocats, a character who always felt weirdly shoehorned into the part. I suppose I can't blame Lasseter for having misgivings about any villain who might seem redolent of Edgar. And yet Bowler Hat Guys works rather wonderfully, compensating for what he lacks in genuine menace with exquisite comic timing (Jim Carrey was at one point attached to the role but pulled out to star in Joel Schmaucher's The Number 23, leaving Anderson himself to fill in with a quasi-Carrey impression that still delivers) and a meaningful thematic backbone. The decision made late in the game that really holds the final character together, more so than having him be the minion of a robotic hat, was to make him the future adult version of Mike "Goob" Yagoobian, Lewis's sleep-deprived roommate (voiced in his child form by Matthew Josten), originally scripted as an entirely separate character. As a twist, it's frankly both a bit of a cheat (since Bowler Hat Guy bears not even the vaguest physical resemblance to Goob) and a smidge too transparent (it's clearly telegraphed in a scene where Bowler Hat Guy and Goob encounter one another, and the former seems inordinately invested in the latter). But it works. I totally buy into it. I can't even fathom how the story was ever supposed to get by without it.

Goob's motivation for turning to villainy is a deliberately silly one, but also poignant and a little startling. An avid young baseball player who was kept awake one night too many by Lewis's tireless inventing, his drowsiness caused him to miss a catch and cost his team an important game. For this he bore a grudge against Lewis that eventually consumed him, leaving him so bitter and angry that he drove away all prospective friends and adopters. It is a dark parallel to the story's other major revelation, that the adult Lewis (Tom Selleck) is none other than the Robinson patriarch (hence the excision of the book's Mr Robinson), now a world-renowned inventor living in a future that represents the best he can possibly be. His path to success was strewn with innumerable mistakes, but each mistake was an opportunity for learning, and each played a vital role into shaping him into the person he has become. The tension between the past and the future is embodied in the conflict between Goob and the Robinsons. Goob, who aspires to get revenge on Lewis by sabotaging his future and becoming a famous inventor in his place, has remained permanently frozen in that moment of childhood failure, emotionally stunted and fixated on lost opportunities, to the point that he has squandered his own future. Rather than learning or growing from his personal setback, he has allowed that setback to define him. He is, for all intents and purposes, a small child inhabiting a gangly adult body (to the extent that he still wears the young Goob's baseball uniform under his black garments), and he serves as a living rebuttal to Lewis's assumption that his salvation lies within the past. Lewis's desire to go back in time and prevent his mother from abandoning him is rooted in the perception that the trajectory he's been on since has been one of non-stop failure, and that his only remedy is to hit the reset button and reclaim the life he feels should have been his. Like Goob, he finds a false refuge in the past, and in the idea of correcting historic wrongs that inhibits his ability to embrace the challenges that could move him to more positive pastures. His former friend, now twisted and malformed beyond all recognition, becomes a grotesque, cautionary reflection of Lewis's skewed priorities, and of the other path he could potentially take if he does not take advantage of what is in front of him - one defined by bitterness and regret.

The nefarious hat Doris, meanwhile, becomes a clever metaphor for Lewis's self-doubt and how it threatens to destroy the many good things he still has every chance of creating if he perseveres. An embodiment of his personal failings, she is a creation of his that did not run according to plan; having taken on a life and a will of her own, she has returned to haunt him, seeking to disrupt his future by eliminating his self-confidence (unlike Goob she has greater ambitions in doing so than mere vengeance). Throughout the film, there is a running theme whereby hats are associated with the suppression of identity - during the portion where Lewis is accommodated by the Robinsons, Wilbur gets him to conceal his distinctive spiky hair by donning varying headgear, so the rest of the family doesn't cotton on to who he really is. Doris is likewise a consumer of selfhood, latching onto Goob because of his low self-worth and subsuming his identity, so that he becomes outwardly recognised as the Bowler Hat Guy. As an offensive weapon, she attacks her victims from the head down, scrambling their thought processes and causing them to lose their sense of purpose. Goob uses a smaller version of the hat (dubbed "Little Doris") to mind control animals into doing his bidding (first one of Mrs Robinson's frogs and then a T Rex), before an entire legion of hats in Doris's likeness are unleashed during the climax and enslave humanity, in a corrupted timeline where Lewis was never able to realise his dreams. Doris recreates this alternate dystopian future in her own image, with hat-shaped monuments dominating the darkened landscape as omnipresent symbols of his crushed potential. Lewis ultimately defeats Doris by asserting his ownership of her, vowing to her that he will never create her and thus willing her out of existence. He overcomes the adversity she presents with the realisation that his self-doubt is his own creation, and that he can take charge of it by not giving it the final say. The resolution is a straightforward triumph of positive thinking over negative thinking, with Goob coming to understand that his mistake was in believing that the latter would protect him. "Doris...I thought she was my friend", he murmurs sadly, echoing the misguided teachings he had earlier dispensed to his younger self, in advising him to let hate be his ally. 

The moral of Meet The Robinsons might be "keep moving forward", with the past being regarded potentially destructive to anyone too fixated on it, but it also presents something of a paradox (one that those inclined to interpret it as an allegory for the demise of traditional animation might want to keep in mind), in that it is a profoundly nostalgic film. Its approach to that all-important future can be described as very backwards-looking and yearnful. The Robinsons are a decidedly old-fashioned futuristic family, the 2037 they inhabit being informed by the kinds of mid-20th century futurist visions that gave us The Jetsons and, more pertinently, the Disney parks' Tomorrowland and Walt's blueprints for Epcot at Walt Disney World. (This is the sense in which Meet The Robinsons is most characteristically a Disney film - its vision of a utopian community is essentially Disneyland, and not light on corporate propaganda.) It may well have been factor in why the film didn't set the world alight upon release, as its relentlessly cheerful, euphoric depictions of the future* might have seemed a notch too quaint to resonate with where we were at in 2007. But then Meet The Robinsons is nothing if not a deeply personal story, and its futuristic visions best appreciated as a reflection of its protagonist's journey, and his progression from forlornness to genuinely relishing where his own potential could take him.

* (The Robinsons' future is optimistic...to a point. It seems that the Canucks have gotten rather a raw deal in 2037, with the country formerly known as Canada now being the US state of North Montana. I'm not sure that I want to know what happened there.) 

How much of the spirit of Joyce's book is retained in Meet The Robinsons?

If Meet The Robinsons is about the tension between past and future, what could have been versus what could be, then A Day with Wilbur Robinson is more concerned with the present moment. It is a book with a distinctly Carpe diem philosophy. The only point in which the future is anticipated is in the closing illustration, where Wilbur bids his friend farewell by holding up the sign: "See Ya Later, Pal." In the context of the book, this affirms that the narrator will return to the Robinson abode and that many more wonderful days with Wilbur Robinson lie ahead. It is also an implicit invitation to the reader to return to the book and to relive the adventure at a later date. The film plays homage to this illustration toward the end, when Wilbur returns Lewis to the year 2007 and bids him farewell by writing "See Ya Later Dad" in the clouds with the time machine. The nature of the relationship has obviously changed, and so has the meaning behind the message. Wilbur promises Lewis that they will meet again, but when they do it will not be as straightforward as simply popping round to a best friend's house for a fun-filled day. In order to reunite with Wilbur, Lewis will have to go through the whole process of growing up, courting the future Mrs Robinson, siring Wilbur and raising him as a child. The Robinsons might represent the end goal, but the real adventure, as Lewis is about to discover, is in the getting there.

On the film's Blu ray commentary, Anderson mentions that Rob Thomas wrote the theme song, "Little Wonders", without having seen the film, and that it was instead informed by the content of Joyce's book. He comments on how remarkable it was that the song opens with the lyrics, "Let it go", which just so perfectly happened to tie in with one of the film's major themes (obviously this commentary was recorded years before a certain other Disney picture completely commandeered the phrase "Let it go" in popular consciousness). Lewis's big moment of letting go, in the film, arrives when he is taken by Wilbur to the point in time where his mother abandoned him, so that he might have the chance to intervene, or at least to gain some understanding of the woman who has long been such a source of fascination to him. To Wilbur's surprise, Lewis approaches her but holds back and avoids interaction. Instead, he confirms his allegiance to his life he has been leading by knocking on the orphanage door and allowing it to play out on its current course (in the opening sequence we'd likely assumed that it was his mother who did the knocking, but it transpires to be the time-travelling Lewis). His closure comes in the realisation that he can leave the question of where he came from unanswered and still have a firm sense of his place in the world. As he tells Wilbur, he already has a family in the Robinsons. Of course, "let it go" is a phrase that can be taken both ways, and on the surface the film's forward-looking approach could be seen as somewhat contrary to the Carpe diem values of the book - in order to make the most of the present moment, the ability to let go of the future can be as valuable as letting go of the past. Yet this is the lesson Lewis that ultimately learns - how to cope with the unknown and to utilise what's on his immediate horizon. Crucially, although his trip to 2037 has given him reassurance of his potential, it does not give him reassurance of certainty. His future with the Robinsons is only a possible future, and nothing is guaranteed him. His adult self is clear that in order to become him, he will have to make the right choices in life. Indeed, the real thrill comes in not knowing exactly what lies ahead, and having a blank slate upon which to make all of the vital discoveries for yourself. This much is also suggested to Lewis by the adult Goob in his final appearance. Lewis requests that the Robinsons forgive Goob and allow him to join the family, but Goob chooses to go his own way before the offer can be extended to him. He leaves Lewis the unicorn filofax in which he was previously seen filling out his checklist of villainous deeds. The old checklist has been scribbled out, and beneath it he has supplied a new checkbox, beside a question mark.

The film ends with Lewis returning to the present day, where he does indeed seem to be making all of the right choices that will get him onto that more auspicious path. He heads back to the science fair, where his newly-restored brain scanner proves a smashing success, attracting the attentions of two prospective adopters who are revealed to be the middle-aged Robinson grandparents. Naturally, they hit it off with Lewis, and before long he's moving out of the orphanage and into his brand new home. He also remembers to attend the young Goob's baseball game and to wake him up at the critical moment, enabling him to make the catch and giving him the possibility of a brighter future. The final shot shows Lewis hard at work at his inventor's desk, enthusiastically sketching out new ideas (including a prototypical Carl), the crumpled bits of paper all around him indicators of the failures that are an inevitable part of the learning process.

Popular perception - if it acknowledges the film at all - has judged Meet The Robinsons as one such failure on Disney's own journey back into relevance, at a time when it was making numerous false or at least questionable new starts. Chicken Little had suggested a bleak, bleak future for Disney (seriously, I would consider Doris's dystopian future over whatever further horrors we might have gotten in a timeline where that abomination had grossed as much as Finding Nemo), while Bolt pointed to a future that was safe, sanitised and frightfully derivative. The Princess and The Frog (2009) gave us a tantalising glimpse into the best future of all, one in which an undervalued art form was given a brand new lease of life, but sadly it was not to be. It was only with Tangled (2010), followed by Wreck It Ralph (2012) that Disney settled into the groove that would work for them for a while, a re-embracing of their traditional fairy tale formula (Frozen, Moana) alternated with attempts at trendier modern stories (Big Hero 6, Zootopia). Maybe Meet The Robinsons was always too singular and unconventional to have represented a viable future for Disney. It's a picture that feels perpetually out of time. But it's really a joy to experience in the moment.